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2020 Annual International Conference on Brain-Inspired Cognitive Architectures for Artificial Intelligence: Eleventh Annual Meeting of the BICA Society
This volume contains the papers presented at BICA*AI 2020: the 2020 Annual
International Conference on Brain-Inspired Cognitive Architectures for Artificial
Intelligence, also known as the Eleventh Annual Meeting of the BICA Society,
held virtually on November 10-15, 2020 in Natal, Rio Grande do Norte.
Biologically Inspired Cognitive Architectures (BICA) are computational frame-
works for building intelligent agents that are inspired from biological intelligence.
Biological intelligent systems, notably animals such as humans, have many qual-
ities that are often lacking in artificially designed systems including robustness,
flexibility and adaptability to environments. At a point in time where visibility
into naturally intelligent systems is exploding thanks to modern brain imaging
and recording techniques, our ability to learn from nature and to build biologi-
cally inspired intelligent systems has never been greater. At the same time, the
growth in computer science and technology has unleashed enough computational
power, that an explosion of intelligent applications from augmented reality to
intelligent virtual agents is now certain. The growth in these fields challenges
the computational replication of all essential aspects of the human mind (the
BICA Challenge), an endeavor which is interdisciplinary in nature and promises
to yield bi-directional flow of understanding between all involved disciplines.
Historically, BICA Conference Series was preceded by the AAAI Fall Sym-
posia on BICA, held in 2008-2009. Originally, participants were mostly the mem-
bers of the DARPA BICA Program of 2005-2006; however, the audience started
expanding rapidly. As a result, in 2010 the BICA Conference Series was initi-
ated as a separate venue, managed by a newly formed nonprofit: BICA Soci-
ety. For 11 years, the BICA conference was organized around the world (USA,
Italy, Ukraine, France, Russia, Czech Republic, Brazil), demonstrating impres-
sive success in growing progression. The conference was complemented by schools
and symposia on BICA, in total making 15 separate events. The BICA Soci-
ety membership reached many hundreds. BICA Society published a number of
books and journals, some of them on the regular basis. Even in 2020 when the
COVID19 hit, the BICA conference still was a great success in the cyberspace
(http://bica2020.org/program/schedule.htm). There is no need to say that the
BICA community today is a well-recognized phenomenon of the scientific world.
The scope of the conference includes topics of the cutting-edge problems
and challenges on the intersection of Artificial Intelligence, Cognitive Model-
ing and Neuroscience related to the BICA Challenge: stated alternatively, to
create a nonbiological human capable of a human-equivalent social life, human-
machine equal partnership and a full-fledged integration into the human soci-
ety at the social level. More specifically, topics include the following: Cognitive
models of emotional intelligence, Machine learning in human-computer social in-
teractions, Intelligent virtual actors and cognitive robots with social-emotional
intelligence, Psychologically inspired emotional cobots and chatbots, Models of
cognitive ontogeny and value system generation, Recognition/expression of emo-
tion in speech, voice, face, gaze, body language, Metrics, tests and criteria for
the believability and social acceptability of IVA.
